413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

Figure 8.4 Online Sites Used
Respondents who worked online indicated that many of them did not engage in online work to the
exclusion of street work, but rather solicited sex work in both venues. Only four of the fourteen
respondents stated that they worked exclusively online. 77
The experience of a 36-year-old respondent from Seattle illustrates the common experience of working
both online and in other venues in the sex market. This woman started her career as a dancer at a club.
After dating johns she met in clubs for a number of years, she began her street work at age 29. It was
around this time that she began soliciting dates online. As she explained, she never abandoned her street
work, in part because she found Internet-solicited sex work to be an unpredictable source of income:
“That’s why you’d work the street. Because you’d get calls for online stuff, but many fall through and the
money is not always in time to get high” (K2).
Although most sex workers worked online and on the streets, a number of respondents reported seeing
fewer sex workers and johns on the streets in recent years. Some speculated that this has occurred as sex
workers and johns have increasingly come to rely on the Internet to establish dates—a trend that will be
explored in the final section of this chapter. A 36-year-old sex worker from Denver, who worked both the
streets and online, observed a decline in johns soliciting sex on the streets. When asked where johns have
gone to engage with sex workers, she responded: “I think online, chat lines. That’s what I was told when I
was out there. That’s where a lot of them are” (J9).
77 It is of particular note that two of these four individuals were detected and arrested by undercover law enforcement officers
during their first attempts to solicit sex work online.
235